Merry Christmas!

 Times of changes are also times of opportunities...

Merry Christmas!

The definition of Herd Immunity according to the WHO. Strait from 1984!

 

The first definition is from Wikipedia. The second is from the WHO.

How is it even possible that doctors at the WHO would write something like this?

Johns Hopkins Newspaper Removes Study Examining COVID Death Rate

This cancelled article confirms what we know and the feedback we get from most countries: No or marginal increase of the death rate overall and nothing significant for older people. 2020 will just end up being an ordinary year...

This does not change the fact that more people than usual have ended up in the emergency wards of local hospitals all over the world but it confirms that beyond a very small sub set of people, for everybody else, Corona is nothing but a bad case of the flu. And that consequently ALL the confinements, lock-downs and other extreme measures, have been over reactions by overwhelmed and incompetent governments. 

unfortunately, the economic impact of all this is very likely to strike the economy like a tsunami in 2021. In this respect, the UK with it's early taste of Brexit may become the canary in the coal mine. Let's see...  

 

Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

Johns Hopkins University’s student newspaper, the News-Letter, reported on a university presentation stating that COVID-19 “had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people” and that the virus “has also not increased the total number of deaths” in comparison to historical data. However, the paper later removed the article, stating that it had been used to support “dangerous inaccuracies” on social media.

Assistant Director for the university’s Applied Economics program Genevieve Briand critically analyzed the net effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the United States based on historical data. Using information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Briand identified the percentages of total deaths per age category both before and after the pandemic began.

“Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19,” said the News-Letter’s article.

“Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.”

Though deaths in categories like respiratory illnesses and heart disease seasonally rise and fall together in the United States, Briand noticed a strange trend.

“Instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease,” in addition to “all other causes.” Additionally, “the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.”

“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded in her presentation. She told the News-Letter that “a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification.”

The News-Letter removed the article in late November after staff discovered its coverage of the study was "used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.” The paper linked a PDF of the original article with a watermark stating “Retracted by the News-Letter” to a statement explaining the decision.

The News-Letter explained that it made the decision independently and encouraged readers to take the article “in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

The staff of the News-Letter referred Campus Reform to an op-ed written December 3 by the paper’s editorial board, which said that “the article should not have been deleted in the first place.”

“Instead of temporarily removing it from our website, the News-Letter should have immediately retracted and provided a detailed explanation of the inaccuracies in Briand’s research,” explained the editors.

“We did not intend to silence Briand; instead, we sought to put her claims in conversation with findings from Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the CDC.”

Briand told Campus Reform that the News-Letter’s decision to remove the article was its own, and pointed out that she explained "during the presentation where I found and downloaded the data from, so anyone can easily replicate my analysis.”     

PS: So not only people have stopped dying from "other causes", but they don't even bother to catch the flu in 2020! Go figure!

Influenza reported by Public Labs: 

2018- 45,881 

2019- 46,974 

2020- 106 

 Influenza reported by clinical labs: 

2018- 183,483 

2019- 250,494 

2020- 496

The Covidians - The Purpose driven Life

 

 Another insightful article to understand the disease affecting our society. Most likely, the Covidians are here to stay! 

The Purpose Driven Life

Guest Post by The Zman

An underappreciated aspect of human society is that humans in large communities need a set of common beliefs. Large society in this context means anything larger than the Dunbar number. Once you get to that number, law codes and a way to enforce them are a necessity. One tool to do this is a common set of beliefs held by most of the members. This provides a mechanism for those rules to become a habit of mind, a shared reality we would think of as culture.

A simple example of this is a taboo against an activity. Let’s say a poisonous berry grows in a part of the forest. The people may develop a taboo about eating anything or even entering that part of the forest. Perhaps they evolve a legend about one of their gods cursing the place or prohibiting people from entering it. Once enough people believe this, it becomes part of the law code of society and it is enforced by collective action against those who break the taboo about entering that area.

It is a crude example, but we have many such examples in the modern day that are not much different from that crude example. For example, Americans remain convinced that eating fat will anger the health gods. There is no science behind the Standard American Diet, but most Americans accept it as true. They don’t think about it. It is just part of the shared beliefs they grew up with and live within, so they accept it as true. We accept all sorts of behavior and environmental nonsense on faith.

Now, it should be noted that the shared beliefs do not have to be accepted by everyone in a society for them to work. Going back to our sacred bit of the forest example, it is not necessary that everyone accept the myth. It just has to be a critical mass that accept it and is willing to act on it. Unless there is an equally compelling reason to resist the myth and the reason is held by a sufficient number of people, a minority belief will become the majority belief in practice, if not spirit.

It is not too hard to find examples of this form of minoritarianism. American history is riddled with causes that were championed by a minority. The proliferating set of taboos related to the Covid beliefs held by the ruling class are a great example. A tiny number of people, relative to the population, deeply believes in these Covid taboos, so they have launched a crusade against Covid. America looks like a weird Muslim country now, because lots of people joined this new belief.

That is another aspect of shared belief. It appears that another prerequisite for large human society is a sense of shared purpose. The answer to why we are here and what is the purpose of our lives is answered within that shared set of beliefs. “My life has meaning because I am part of this great cause of my people” is a highly efficient way of enforcing group behavior. The best rules are those eagerly enforced by a set of true believers whose purpose in life is to enforce compliance.

Move backward through popular politics in America and you see one holy crusade after another driving the political debate. Today it is driven by Covidians. Before that it was driven by white liberals thinking Obama was Jesus. Before that it was driven by the war on terrorism. When the Baby Boomers had kids in school the crusade was to fix the schools so everyone could be educated. Go back further and we had a war on drugs and, of course, the great crusade against the evils of communism.

American history has been one crusade after another. The great battle between good whites and bad whites exists because it fills that need for a purpose. In the albescence of some external foe, the good whites keep their crusading skills sharp by going to war with the bad whites over some moral cause. This not only gives purpose to their lives, but it also reinforces those shared beliefs about who they are and why they exist. The reaction from the bad whites serves much the same purpose.

If you observe the Covidians for a bit, you see this need for purpose. The HBD community, for example, rushed to be the early adopters of the new faith, sensing it was a way back into the community of the respectable. It was not a conscious decision on their part. They did not vote on their secret e-mail list to become Covidians. It was the result of a shared desire to be rehabilitated and restored to polite society, along with the general sense that their purpose in life is to inform the rulers on the human sciences.

The same can be said for the women volunteering to be the mask police in every community in America. The natural role of women has been so reduced in status that this artificial role of Covidian den mother has become highly appealing. Mothers have been far less emotional about things like mask wearing and social distancing than the army of unattached, childless females. The reason is they have kids to scratch that maternal itch, so being a Covidian den mother has little appeal.

The fact is, human societies need shared beliefs. One aspect of that shared belief is a shared purpose. Most people, certainly not all, need that space labeled “purpose” to be filled by society. This is especially true of childless females. It is also true for males with no male role to play. Stripped of natural sex roles, this need for purpose is filled with causes that give purpose to life. The people wearing masks in their cars are not sheep following orders. They are believers looking for a god.

The Death of Europe by Douglas Murray. (Video)

Watching what is currently going on in Europe and the US from Japan is puzzling. So much self doubt and compromise with principles and ideas that in the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are staring at decadence. Douglas Murray eloquently and skillfully makes the point. Not much reconfort for the coming Christmas but then again not facing issues strait on is exactly what it's all about and where the West is losing the plot!

 

US politics: When Deplorables Become Ungovernables

2020, What a year! But we ain't seen nothing yet!

 

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.

What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?

They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict:

1. the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts;

2. the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland;

3. and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.

Superstructure, though, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South.

Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.

1. Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home.

2.  He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East.

3. And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.

Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control?

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

1. A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.

2. Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.

3. Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Dangers abound.

On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.

Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that:

“the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.

Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations

that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.

Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message:

“This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”

District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.

And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.

A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.

Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.

Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.

Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.

A perverse blowback

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

1. The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.

2. Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.

For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.

2020: The year we lost the plot!

 “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

“Our Government, along with Governments around the world will shortly announce the quarantining of whole populations for a seasonal respiratory virus which leaves 99.8-99.9% of those who get it in the land of the living. What is more, they will also announce a shutdown of the entire economy for months and then, when the epidemic has actually gone, will mandate that you cover the lower half of your face with a bit of cloth. They will do this by frightening people into compliance with a barrage of propaganda, slogans, data entirely taken out of context, and the threat of massive fines.”

Anyone making this claim at the beginning of the year would rightly have been thought to have mislaid the plot and their marbles, long ago. But here we are, at the end of that same year, and it is precisely what has happened.

Only it is much worse than that.

Had you somehow been persuaded to give credence to this insane prophecy, you would probably have been comforted by the following thought: “They’ll never get away with it. The people will never stand for it.”

Not a bit of it. Somehow, millions of people across the country, and in fact across the world, were persuaded to accept it. By far the majority somehow thought that quarantining whole nations of healthy people for a virus, for the first time in history, was a good idea. Well, actually the second time in history to be precise. It was tried in 2009 by the Mexican Government during the Swine Flu outbreak, but they had the good sense to end it after a couple of weeks after realising how much it would devastate the country.

Yet not only do we have our imaginary conspiracy loon’s mad ravings come true, but those same people who have accepted it look upon those of us who have been pointing out the madness of it all as if we were those who had taken leave of our senses. Oh irony, thou hast had a field day in 2020. As St. Antony the Great put it:

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

To cut to the chase, we have gone and thrown out reason, rationality and proportionality this year. A coronavirus, which posed a danger to a very small proportion of our society, but which actually has an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26% (not too dissimilar to a bad seasonal flu), and which could thus have been dealt with proportionality, somehow became the catalyst for the biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race. Indeed, many were so taken in by the great hypnotic spell set in motion by charlatans with their “hard-hitting emotional messaging,” that they adopted practices so irrational and disproportionate to the threat, one wonders how they managed to live before this year.

The history books tell of one of our great Kings, Canute, demonstrating to his courtiers that contrary to their supposition, he could not in fact control the waves. In our day, it’s like King Canute has gone rogue, telling his subjects that he can control the waves and viruses, and his subjects have responded by not only believing him, but by taking any action he tells them they must do to stop the waves or the virus, including confining themselves to their homes, closing their businesses, wearing cloths on their faces, along with umpteen other truly bizarre and wholly useless diktats. Then, when the waves or the virus continue doing what waves and viruses do, a wave of Covidian Logic bursts over us and we find it is our fault that they have not been controlled. We didn’t shut down hard enough or long enough, or we played board games at Christmas.

In the real world, the only thing that got controlled this year was not a virus, but people. That all went off spiffingly, or spaffingly as Comrade Johnson might put it. People were suppressed, people were controlled, people were — you might say — owned. And by and large they acquiesced in putting their hand to this National Suicide Plan.

Of course, the reply that comes the way of anyone who points this out is:

“Ah, but if we hadn’t locked down and masked up, the deaths would have been in the hundreds of thousands.”

To which the answer is simply:

“Nope. Lockdown cannot be shown to have saved a single life.”

Sweden, by not turning itself into a basketcase, failed to have the anything like wave of mass deaths predicted by the Enthusiasts for Lockdown. Nor did other nations that took a similar approach. A recent peer-reviewed study from France, looking at 188 countries, has confirmed what should have been obvious all along:

“Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”

Then of course there was the Danish RCT study, which showed no significant statistical difference between infection rates of those wearing surgical masks, and those with no masks.

Imagine that!

Imagine that we were put under house arrest for months, made to cover our respiratory passages with bits of cloth, forced to alter our lives, and threatened with fines for non-compliance — and none of it made any difference to mortality.

Imagine that this Government and Parliament caused the complete shutdown of the economy for months, putting millions on the dole, wrecking 1,000s of businesses, causing the worst recession for 300 years, and piling up a future of debt, poverty, mental health issues and reduced life expectancy — and none of it saved any lives.

Imagine that we are still in this situation, with people still acquiescing in the destruction of their own country, the Government and media still feeding us lies, and with no real plausible end to this madness.

Actually, you have no need to imagine it. Even though it is so outlandish that even the most unhinged, basement-dwelling “conspiracy nut” on the planet could not have come up with this, it is indeed the year you just lived through. We lost the plot in 2020, and the most pressing question is: will we get it back in 2021?

That all went off spiffingly, or spaffingly as Comrade Johnson might put it. People were suppressed, people were controlled, people were — you might say — owned. And by and large they acquiesced in putting their hand to this National Suicide Plan.

Of course, the reply that comes the way of anyone who points this out is:

“Ah, but if we hadn’t locked down and masked up, the deaths would have been in the hundreds of thousands.”

To which the answer is simply:

“Nope. Lockdown cannot be shown to have saved a single life.”

Sweden, by not turning itself into a basketcase, failed to have the anything like wave of mass deaths predicted by the Enthusiasts for Lockdown. Nor did other nations that took a similar approach. A recent peer-reviewed study from France, looking at 188 countries, has confirmed what should have been obvious all along:

“Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”

Then of course there was the Danish RCT study, which showed no significant statistical difference between infection rates of those wearing surgical masks, and those with no masks.

Imagine that!

Imagine that we were put under house arrest for months, made to cover our respiratory passages with bits of cloth, forced to alter our lives, and threatened with fines for non-compliance — and none of it made any difference to mortality.

Imagine that this Government and Parliament caused the complete shutdown of the economy for months, putting millions on the dole, wrecking 1,000s of businesses, causing the worst recession for 300 years, and piling up a future of debt, poverty, mental health issues and reduced life expectancy — and none of it saved any lives.

Imagine that we are still in this situation, with people still acquiescing in the destruction of their own country, the Government and media still feeding us lies, and with no real plausible end to this madness.

Actually, you have no need to imagine it. Even though it is so outlandish that even the most unhinged, basement-dwelling “conspiracy nut” on the planet could not have come up with this, it is indeed the year you just lived through. We lost the plot in 2020, and the most pressing question is: will we get it back in 2021?

The Internet Is For Porn

This is on the outer edge of data but a growing Internet field nevertheless thanks to Covid and all the lockdowns...

 

Via The Margins substack,

This post is written by a friend of Margins, who happens to be a product executive at a public tech company. He wrote this initially in September 2020, but we were hesitant to publish it anonymously. Nevertheless, our friend turned out to be very insightful and we thought it’d be a shame (hah!) not to share his wisdom. It’s not like we’ve never written about it before. Enjoy!

One of the biggest and most interesting things happening in the consumer web right now is running almost completely under the radar. It has virtually zero Silicon Valley involvement. There are no boastful VCs getting rich. It is utterly absent from tech’s plethora of twitters, fora and media (at least, as they say, “on main”). Indeed, the true extent of its incredible success has gone almost completely unnoticed, even by its many, many, many customers.

I’m talking, of course, about OnlyFans.

OnlyFans, the content subscription service that has come to be dominated by sex workers, has only been around since 2016. It works a bit like Instagram-meets-Patreon, or perhaps Twitch - for porn. Users pay to follow content creators and unlock exclusive material. The applications to porn are pretty obvious, and unlike its more prudish cousins, OnlyFans has openly embraced adult content creators. “OF” gives creators an array of tools for monetizing their audiences, with not only different subscription tiers, but ways to allow paying customers to directly interact with creators. 

OnlyFans was already growing steadily before COVID, but the platform has absolutely exploded during the pandemic in a manner of “hypergrowth” fantasy. According to their CEO, they were adding nearly 200,000 new users and 8,000 new content creators a day back in May, and have only continued to grow since. The platform now has north of 700,000 content creators (!) serving a customer base of over 50 million registered users (!!). Hard stats are hard to come by, but one figure pegged the cumulative total paid out to creators at $725 million as of May. Cardi B joined the platform in May.

In short, OnlyFans is for real. It’s becoming not just the next generation of porn, but it might just represent a quantum leap in fixing one of the world’s most popular industries. 

And Silicon Valley has almost nothing to do with it. The reasons why are worth reflecting on.

No, really - the internet is for porn

Let me stop here and say: if you’re uncomfortable with pornography, it’s better to just stop reading right here.

I am unashamed to be a casual porn consumer. In this, I am extremely normal. Volumes of research show that nearly all men - old and young, married and single, straight, gay and everywhere along the spectrum - consume porn on occasion. While a majority of porn consumers are men, a huge number of women are watching, too. Pornhub reports that about a third of its American audience are women.

Giggles, eye-rolls and the occasional moral scold aside, porn is a gigantic industry that serves an equally enormous popular demand. The cavernous disparity between the demonstrably massive popularity of porn and our popular unwillingness to even acknowledge it exists is a truly bizarre facet of American puritanical culture.

While the oft-cited stat that porn is a third of all internet traffic is probably a myth, search engine companies say it represents about 10-15% of all queries. That’s a lot! Pornhub alone received about 120 million unique visitors a day even before COVID forced everyone indoors. By comparison, CNN reported a record-breaking 148 million uniques in the month of January. (Fox News had only 104 million.) No one’s quite sure how large the entire porn industry is, but it’s safely assumed to be in the $5 billion range at least - around a third the size of the global video game industry.

In other words, porn is a huge, popular and extremely mainstream industry - which people insist on not talking about and enjoying in private. (Or maybe in a private browser window.)

The porn industry itself has long been famously problematic. Like many industries that rely on talent that is often young and naive, greedy middlemen (almost always men) who control production and channels of distribution take all the upside for themselves. A perfect example is porn mega-name Mia Khalifa, who was paid a grand total of $12,000 for only a handful of shoots - a tiny, tiny fraction of the value her content has generated for distributors like Pornhub.

Free porn sites - Pornhub chief among them - have done to the porn industry what Facebook and Google did to ad-supported media. By aggregating demand for “free” porn, they vacuumed up all the ad revenue that had once kept studios and distributors (not to mention the stars) in business while demolishing any reason to pay for their content. You can buy a subscription to sites like Pornhub, of course, but that doesn’t really solve the problem; it’s a bit like buying a subscription to Facebook to read the newspaper. While some porn actors/actresses have been able to build personal brands to monetize their content, this is an extremely difficult process. For sex workers must not only face all the normal challenges to creating unique identities online, but they must do it with an openly hostile Silicon Valley fighting them at every step.

That isn’t hyperbole. At almost every turn, the tech industry has gone out of its way to penalize, marginalize and - yes - “cancel” sex workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are women responding to ravenous male demand. PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, Square and almost every other payments service shuts down their accounts. Twitter shadowbans them while Tumblr, Instagram and Snapchat either over-enforce rules or ban adult content accounts entirely. The Big Blue App, of course, doesn’t permit adult content at all - and neither does Apple or Google’s App Stores.

An observer might note that all of these companies are dominated by men, in an industry dominated by men, tightly interwoven with a venture capital industry that is super-dominated by men. So it’s curious why none of these men have shown any interest in addressing the massive and lucrative sex work industry that overwhelmingly serves, well, men; until you consider who pays the real costs of that industry’s brokenness: women.

Silicon Valley’s blind spots

Would more women in positions of power in Silicon Valley’s tech giants and top VC firms ever have funded an OnlyFans service or its like? It’s hard to say. The cultural taboos around porn are powerful - so powerful that they’ve kept an American redoubt of hyper-capitalism from even sniffing at a gigantic industry badly in need of innovation. Also, part of the sexist constructs of femininity that women operate in include ideas of purity and moral rectitude that might have discouraged them from even broaching the topic. Or maybe not. We don’t really know.

Here’s what we do know: plenty of the men who have waged war on sex workers’ livelihoods from positions of enormous power in tech also consume porn and even personally hire those same sex workers. Yet when you combine American prudishness with the tech industry’s obsession with polishing mostly-male personal brands, the Valley’s refusal to consider legitimate sex worker needs becomes easier to understand. It’s unlikely that the engineers, product managers and executives who made those product decisions that upended sex workers’ lives ever understood, or perhaps even considered, their impacts. Or if they did, it seems that sex workers are considered expendable users. (Again, at least in public.)

This has created a large digital underclass of sex workers - including, but far from limited to, adult performers - who live in fear of being banned by the big tech platforms while simply doing their jobs. The vast majority are women serving a heterosexual male audience. Most of them do nothing illegal at all, but they operate in the long shadow of those powerful (and powerfully sexist) cultural taboos and their resulting hypocritical popularity.

It would not have taken a market strategy genius to spot an opening for OnlyFans here: a high-quality digital platform where adult performers can capture the lion’s share of value for their own content. And indeed, there have been other similar attempts to do this (again, ignored by mainstream tech). But what OnlyFans figured out was that to pry open consumers’ willingness to pay for porn again, they needed to offer exclusive content and the ability to interact with performers, as well as a way for creators to brand-build on their platform. 

The popular performer Aella, who makes something on the order of $100,000 a month on OnlyFans, discussed some of her specific monetization strategies in this fascinating (and SFW) interview:

OnlyFans takes off

OnlyFans’ 20% cut of its creators’ revenues might be most usefully compared to Patreon’s 10% take-rate. Despite that big bite (which OnlyFans says really amounts to 12% after merchant fees and processing), OnlyFans has nevertheless scaled to roughly three-quarters of a billion in payouts in not quite 4 years, with no evident external funding. (OnlyFans is not even listed on Crunchbase). By contrast, it took Patreon 6 years, and $166 million (!) in venture funding, to reach $1 billion from 4 million “patrons.” 

Which of these two companies sounds more successful?

To be sure, OnlyFans is not perfect. They are dealing with growth pains like subscriber churn, spam, creators who have trouble getting their payouts and a back tax problem. There are also the usual creator discovery problems that almost all influencer platforms encounter. It can be difficult for adult performers in particular to market themselves, given the strict rules about their content on many social platforms discussed above.

Nevertheless, OnlyFans has distinguished itself not only by helping a very large number of sex workers make an honest living, but by treating them like first-class citizens rather than a scourge. In doing so, it’s not only saving the porn industry, but demonstrating how to make it a better, safer and more equitable place by aligning incentives for consumers and creators.

The breakout success of OnlyFans is laudable, but should prompt some soul-searching in the power centers of Silicon Valley. Why did it take this long? Why would no one else have the courage to address sex work? Why does the same industry that exalts such morally ruinous firms as Palantir, Facebook and Palmer Lucky’s actual next-gen weapons startup get queasy about consenting adults wanting to see naked bodies?

And if they missed this market opportunity, think about how many more are out there - invisible only to the affluent men who run “tech.”

Footnote: Pornhub’s excellent Insights blog (SFW) is chock-full of incredible insights about global porn interests that their analytics team puts together. Yes, people are searching for “coronavirus porn”.

 

The Danger Of A "Digital Assistant"

I currently spend over 50% of my time on AI and I believe that those who are not scared yet do not understand the issues!

AI is unstoppable. It will first be used as a tool to help / control us then will quickly acquire useful but black box capabilities which will quickly become extremely dangerous. In an ideal world, we would think twice before implementing some technologies but we do not live in an ideal world. Whatever advantage can be acquired by using AI will overwhelm any resistance to further improvements. I agree with this article: Now would be the time to think... but we won't. 

When we talk about AI. people think "consciousness". This not the issue! The machine will outsmart and therefore control our lives long before they become conscious. In a "smart" city, the only dangerous element left is a free human being!

 

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

When one of those so-called personal digital assistants started to babble the other day I cursed it and told it to "shut the f**k up." That is when it happened, to my surprise the damn thing told me something to the effect, "I may only be an AI but you should choose your words wisely." Whether you define this as a warning or stern rebuke, to me it highlighted the danger of AI and the whole tech industry that is slowly putting a chokehold on the freedom of the human race. A digital device being impertinent to its owner is the canary in the coal mine of something very sinister.

Rude or impertinent remarks made in reply to someone in authority is backtalk and different from talk-back. When a mechanical device has a talk-back option it is generally to provide spoken feedback to help the user. A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a portable electronic device used for personal organization and communication. Over the years these devices have expanded their ability as predictive chat-bots. They do this by utilizing advanced computer programs that simulate a conversation with the people who use it. 

Each year more and more companies are using such features in robocalls and for such things as answering phones and for customers to pay a bill or get general information. On the internet, you can find companies that will design for your company a bot in minutes claiming it can start acquiring leads for you and automate several other parts of your communication needs. They tout these Bots' ability to work for you 24/7 delivering qualified leads, speeding up customer resolutions, providing faster answers, and improving customer experience.

For years concern has been growing over the ability of such devices to spy on us in the privacy of our homes and offices. Most of us have read or seen stories of how they listen in on our conversations and hijack even our most private moments. The new alliance between AWS this morning and Twitter only goes to underscore my point of concentrated power. This intersects with censorship and propaganda. The whole idea that we as a society gain by allowing ourselves to be watched for the greater good throws freedom under the bus. It also opens the door the those watching us to blackmail and coerce us into doing their bidding.  

The crux of this article is to clarify and point out this trend towards Orwellian totalitarianism is rapidly accelerating. This expanding surveillance of our every move is not just coming from the digital object sitting on our tables but a slew of other places as well. We are being watched by drones, cameras as we shop, and pictures are being taken of us in our vehicles as we drive. Many of these are being stored away for future reference.

If anyone reading this feels these products or the people developing them have feelings that should be respected. That person is far more politically correct than I chose to be. As far as their feeling are concerned, quoting the words of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, "frankly my dear I don't give a damn." I'm not interested in being told what to do or think by a machine controlled by some entity hidden behind a curtain. 

Before his death, famed physicist Stephen Hawking left us with a warning the Earth is headed for a “catastrophic ending” in the near future as a result of rising inequality fueled by robots that grow increasingly smarter by the day. Hawking's dire prediction came as robots and artificial intelligence increasingly take over human jobs.

Two years ago I wrote a five-part series focused on this important issue that impacts all our lives. The links to these articles are listed below. If you have concerns about the direction society is taking us I urge you to read one or all of them and even share the information with a friend or those you love.

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2018/12/liberals-and-conservatives-both-buy.html

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2018/12/surveillance-justified-expands-grip-of.html

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2019/01/propaganda-convinces-us-its-all-for.html

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2019/01/orwellian-government-employing-robots.html

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2019/01/power-of-orwellian-state-almost.html

The best time to kill a monster is when it is still small. Unfortunately, this monster is growing at a tremendous rate. This monster is the child of governments and technology and its goal is to grow more powerful. By convincing us that technology and robots will add quality to our lives they are seducing a weak-minded population into submission. When we surrender control of our lives to those and the forces that gain from our compliance we would be wise to remember we are at their mercy. Because of technology many factors have changed over the years, this means if and when people attempt to take back control over their lives it will be almost impossible.

 

The EU Continues To Wobble While France Holds It Ransom

I normally do not post political articles since I could not care less. But this one is an exception for personal use. What is going on in Europe, concerning Brexit and other subjects, is a catastrophe. The political project which started with good intentions to unite diverse European countries has degenerated into a terrible, mostly unelected bureaucracy at the mercy of lobbies and "external forces" and rendered inoperative. But at the same time, instead of creating a diverse and democratic grouping on the Swiss model as many expected, it has followed the centralist and autocratic model of the worst members, such as France. On this path, it will fail sooner than later. But not without a bang which will rattle the continent for decades. The worst is that it didn't have to be like this.   

Authored by Martin Jay via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Too many signs have shown us that the EU is in real trouble. The worst one possibly is that its own outdated idea about governance is replicated by a French leader facing defeat. What losers!

In practical terms, it is clear to see that the EU as a viable project is not only in a panic mode currently, but actually going backwards in its desire to model itself on a United States of Europe federal model. And there can be no better examples than Brexit negotiations, Covid and France’s current malaise.

At the eleventh hour we have seen how, despite Britain remaining steadfast to its demands at the negotiations for a departure from the European Union, the EU itself shoots itself in both feet and looks even to its own supporters to be a loser of the highest order. Last minute demands are thrown into the negotiations by France’s Macron who is fearful of his own presidency hopes being scuppered if he has to deal with the wrath of thousands of French fishermen who will be out of a living by January 1st – if Britain is to get back full control of her own waters. To counter this with new demands about how the UK, as a non-member of the EU, goes about its business internally is both hilarious and desperate. Of course as a non-member of the bloc the UK will have its own ideas about how government interacts with business and state aid rules. How did a desperate French president threw this into the negotiations at really the eleventh hour demonstrates how weak the EU is and when it is presented with important matters, how it plays the role of a cheap girlfriend to its real masters. The fact that France could be allowed to do this is shocking. But the truth is that Macron is not playing for a deal. He prefers a no deal which he can use as political capital for his own fishermen. And the EU almost fell for it. Clearly there are divisions within the EU as to how to go about getting a Brexit. Many member states, like Germany, for example, are happy to give back fishing rights to the UK in exchange for a Brexit deal. Doesn’t the EU have billions of euros at its disposal to compensate and retrain out of work citizens? Of course it does. Structural funds run into billions and there is no viable reason why the existing EU rules would not favour out of work French fisherman.

But this cheap shot by the EU, to be hijacked by France, makes it look weak and ineffective, which will cost it dearly at the polls, when it has its own elections in 2024.

But it’s not only Brexit which is dividing this bloc which has ambitions about being a superpower with its own army. You don’t need to look very far to see that there is a distinct lack of unity in the organisation which is causing it to haemorrhage. In mid-November, it couldn’t sign off an agreement to put aside almost 2 trillion dollars for a rescue plan for member states which were hit hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic, namely Italy and to some extent Spain. The six-year budget, which is supposed to be approved now, will not include this package, which will be seen as a major blow to Italy and will almost certainly lead to a growth there of an anti-EU sentiment, marking out Italy as ripe for a massive swing of far right votes in the European parliament, if not a campaign for Italy to leave the EU all together. Poland and Hungary blocked the proposal as a way of showing France and Germany – the real owners of the entire EU project – that it wouldn’t be bullied on other contentious areas like immigration.

This is the real worry for eastern European countries. Their elites could not face an influx of immigrants from troubled hotspots in Africa – which coincidentally are also the same recipients of hundreds of millions of euros of aid. There is a link between the cataclysmic human rights abuses from these regimes and the outflow of middle class citizens who borrow money to pay snake heads to transport them to Libya and then onto Europe.

But the EU itself can’t join up the dots and see this. Just as journalists aren’t making the link between Macron’s problems in France – an economy struggling to cope with cheaper imports which are supposed to respect EU directives (but invariably don’t) – and immigration, which is leading to the far right taking more of his votes. France, a founding member of the EU, can’t find a single journalist in the entire republic to make these links, and yet citizens themselves see it clearly. The appalling video footage of the black music producer being beaten up shocked the entire world.

But Macron’s thinking behind new laws which he is pushing for – to make it illegal to film police officers – comes straight out of any Middle Eastern dictator’s handbook on how to profit from creating a police state. Macron needs to deal with immigration and the police, to save himself at the polls. And no one is kidding themselves about the new law and its purposes. The EU has always been a dictatorship which uses the auspices of a democracy to cover its real intentions. Its creation was really about being a greater power to supersede democracies which couldn’t get things done. But now, what we are experiencing is a full circle where individual member states are reacting with such vitriol towards the project, that they are indulging themselves at the same font. Macron is becoming a third world dictator who will happily strip France of its democratic credentials, if it means he can stay in power. Clinging on to power, in fact, is the shared theme of both his presidency and the EU itself. Inevitably, it will be the EU which will give him a top paid job, when he fails at the polls as the EU loves tradition above everything else.